


the valley's gonna swallow me whole

by with_the_monsters



Category: Eye Candy (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 02:26:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3511793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/with_the_monsters/pseuds/with_the_monsters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She comes to him in the middle of the night without a second thought. There's a junkyard to visit and a murderer waiting in the wings, so of course he says yes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the valley's gonna swallow me whole

**Author's Note:**

> Set post 1x07 and pre 1x08.
> 
> Title from Novocaine by Fall Out Boy.

He feels like he’s been breathless since she slid into the passenger seat of his car. Even now, with her walking behind him, just close enough that their hands brush every time hers swings forward and his swings back, he can’t shake the sensation of having his last breath trapped in his chest.

She’d been so determined to come back here. So _serious_ when he’d opened his front door and come face-to-face with her frown.

“He was watching us,” she’d said without much preamble, eyes bright, never leaving his, “I can’t stop thinking about it. The whole time me and Reiss were there he was _filming_. There’s something—there has to be something. Just—I just need to be there again. Please?”

He’d made his usual repertoire of exasperated and reluctant sounds. She’d already turned around to leave, confident of his inability to let her go without following. As he’d closed the door behind himself, Tommy had determinedly _not_ considered just what her expectations of him said about the transparency of his feelings.

So now they’re in a junkyard in the middle of the night, the unsleeping city behind them and the carcasses of cars hulking around and above them, dead metal reminders: _everything dies_. He’s got his free hand on his gun, but he doubts any stalker will be greeting them here. It’s too random, too unexpected. He gets the feeling that even Lindy wasn’t certain she was coming here when she left her apartment.

He can hear her breathing behind him. It’s like the rest of her—light, focused, careful. Tommy’s spent a lot of time thinking about Lindy’s breathing. The silence of it most of the time, as controlled as the rest of her. Ragged and heaving that night in the secret room behind that mirror, her hands stretched up above her head and bare back arched forward like she was going to snap her spine in two from fear.  And the best and worst kind of breathing; the kind that shoots echoes up and down his dreams (Lindy pressed against his pillows, Lindy’s fluttering ribs underneath his hands, Lindy’s breathing fractured and fearsome as she gasps over and over against his mouth—). When he’s awake he does his best not to think about the third kind. It does things to him that he’s not sure he’s comfortable with.

“It was round here,” she says suddenly, pushing past him and striding out into the centre of the junkyard. She catches a piece of litter with a careless foot and sends it arcing across the tarmac in front of them. The sound of it makes her jump a little, and Tommy recognises her shock as a symptom of her new reality. Lindy-before would have just cocked her head and watched it go. Lindy-after twitches back from it, rocks her whole body away from the source of surprise. Without even thinking, Tommy steps closer. She turns her head up to him then and laughs; a shivery, self-deprecating thing. She starts moving again before either of them can comment on it.

They press through a scattered carpet of tossed away soda cans, a downtrodden constellation of aluminium stars. The warm orange glow of a lamp catches on Lindy’s skin, wraps around her cheekbone and turns her briefly into something almost artistic. Tommy’s breath is still caught. It’s a state that might be grace if it didn’t hurt so much.

She halts in front of a corrugated iron lean-to, something that looks like it might have tried to be a shelter at some point and then given up completely. When he steps up to take a good look at her face he finds her staring pensively at a pair of battered plastic chairs. She doesn’t look especially sad or frightened—instead, she is wearing a look of the most intent concentration he has seen on anybody.

There’s another thing he files away with her imagined presence in his bed and the memory of her mouth opening against his: the fact that sometimes he physically cannot drag his eyes away when he catches her lost in concentration. Her focus is a laser-beam, is a frenzy. The way it shapes her face just captivates him. He can’t admit how much he’d like to be the subject of it.

“He must have been—” she begins, and then swings around and points behind Tommy, towards the gap between an old Chevy and a BMW, “—down there. And then he crossed here and followed Reiss.”

Her voice doesn’t catch at all. Tommy nods briskly and replies, “Right, well, stay here. I’ll go—”

“Like hell,” she interrupts, already pushing past him to dive for the gap and begin wriggling into it. Tommy bites off a growl of frustration.

“Whatever you’re trying to prove,” he tells her irritably, twisting his tall frame sideways to slide behind her, “You can cut it out. There’s nothing brave about throwing yourself into dangerous situations without any kind of defence.”

“He’s stalking _me_ ,” rejoins her voice out of the darkness in front of him, “So that means I’m the first one to put myself in danger.”

“Lindy,” he huffs out, having to give a good shove on both cars to push himself through a particularly narrow gap, “I’m a _cop_. It’s my _job_ to go first.”

He escapes the gap so suddenly he nearly falls right onto Lindy. She’s stopped in a small space among the metal and turned around. Her gaze, backlit by a hazy yellow light, is inscrutable. Tommy thinks she might take a jab at his abilities or maybe insist that she can take care of herself.

Instead she says,  “Ben was a cop.”

Then she turns back around and plunges on.

Tommy gives himself a minute. _Ben_. Always Ben. Ben missing and Ben too present. Ben dead and Ben so alive that any thoughts Tommy might entertain about Lindy in any other manner than platonic are unconscionable. His best friend Ben and Lindy’s ex-boyfriend Ben—drawing them together and keeping them apart all at once.

Loathe to dwell on his feelings, Tommy shuts the grief down after barely a moment and prepares to follow Lindy. He’s just got his hands on the next line of cars when she reappears in front of him. Her expression is wild, eyes wide and searing. Tommy takes a step back so that she can wriggle out into the small clearing once more.

“Look!” she exclaims in frantic triumph, holding up an unidentifiable brown curl. There is a brief silence as Lindy awaits equal delight and Tommy awaits an explanation.

“Well?” he says after it becomes clear that she’s not explaining anything without prompting, “What am I looking at?”

“It’s some film!” she replies, almost tripping over her words in her excitement. She turns the brown curl so it catches the dim light behind her, and Tommy recognises it all in a rush. His stomach sinks. Surely she knows that it will be useless? It will have caught too much light to have any information left on it at all.

“Lindy,” he says, trying to modulate his tone to be placatory, “That’s great, but you know it will have had too much light to tell us anything, right?”

She’s too caught up in her discovery to let him dent her enthusiasm.

“It was half under a car, we might be able to find something—even a fingerprint, maybe!”

She catches his doubtful expression and rolls her eyes, pulling open her handbag to press the film inside carefully.

“This could be huge. Don’t—don’t ruin it until we know for sure.”

Tommy steps back and puts his hands up in the air, half serious and half not. She scrunches her nose up at him like a child, briefly playful, and then lets her solemnity descend once more. Tommy drops his hands. She forgets herself sometimes, forgets the situation and the killer at her heels. Forgets her missing sister and her endless hopeless search. In those moments Tommy gets a glimpse of the girl she might have been if nothing had gone wrong—if her mother hadn’t died and her sister hadn’t been kidnapped right in front of her and if she’d never caught the attention of the worst person possible. Tommy wonders if they’d ever have crossed paths if not for any of it, and knows that he can’t ever hate the circumstances as fully as he ought. Lindy’s life up until now has brought him into her orbit, has moulded her into a woman he can’t ever pull away from. It’s like it’s calibrated her gravity exactly to pull him in.

He knows he’s utterly fucked.

They work their way back out to the centre of the junkyard. Lindy’s riding the high of her film discovery and pushes on, threading them in and out of battered metal hunks and down the route the killer followed Reiss through. She barely flinches when she recognises the shapes around her from the video, says nothing as Tommy pulls out a pad to jot brief notes down about the height of the shack and anything else he can spot that might be of use.

She’s silent for so long that Tommy’s desire to ask her what’s wrong is a maddening, needling weight in his throat by the time they go back to his car. He’s struggling so hard to resist the urge that he can barely concentrate on reversing out of the junkyard and getting back onto the freeway into the city. He so desperately wants to ask—but he also desperately wants to preserve his attitude of casual disapproval of her. It’s the only way he knows to keep his guilty conscience in check.

Fortunately for his warring mind, Lindy breaks the silence. He watches her bite worriedly at her lip out of the corner of his eye for a few moments, and then she swallows hard and opens her mouth.

“I, um,” she begins, then pauses and starts again, “I wanted to ask you about that night. In the apartment. Everything went to shit, obviously, but—”

Tommy hopes to God this isn’t going where he thinks it’s going.

“—I know it was just acting, honestly. But I just thought that maybe… you know, when you kissed me?” She phrases it like a question, though Tommy genuinely has no clue what she’s asking. He glances at her and her expression is begging him to understand without her having to actually say it. But Tommy is difficult, has always been difficult, and so he just raises one eyebrow.

“What about it?”

She frowns again and lets out a frustrated huff. It makes her nose crinkle just a little at the brow, and he has to fight very hard to stop his hand lifting off the gearstick and smoothing the creases out.

“Well,” she replies, her tone a little heated, “It’s just that it felt kind of sincere. Despite the—you know, _situation_. And you’re probably just going to be a dick about this, but I wanted to ask anyway. I know we had to sell it. But it seemed like… more than that to me.”

Tommy’s gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles are going white. He can feel Ben’s breath down his neck. Can feel the weight of a friendship stretching back to childhood demanding loyalty. Tommy Calligan is a lot of things, but he’s never been a traitor.

So he pulls the side of his mouth up in a cocky little grin, lifts his eyebrows and darts a teasing look across at her.

“I really sold it then, huh? Got you, even. Damn, I’m good.”

Lindy makes this quiet, hurt little noise and pulls her knees up to her chest. Tommy fixes his eyes on the road ahead. The city sprawls out before them, bright and dangerous. His chest is too tight. Lindy’s too _much_ , too close, too necessary. He’s not far from the realisation that Ben or not, he wants to kiss Lindy until they grow old and die.

She doesn’t say anything else until he pulls up in front of her apartment building. He kills the engine and then they just sit there without saying anything. He’s waiting for her to get out of the car but hoping that she never does. Out of the corner of his eye he sees her set one hand on the door handle and then pause there. He turns to look at her. It’s too much to resist.

Their eyes meet in the dark of the silent car. Lindy looks a little frayed, a little wild. She looks like she’s pulling herself apart by her edges. Without thinking, without even hesitating, Tommy leans in the barest fraction of an inch.

Lindy’s face goes tight. She huffs out the tiniest, most smug little laugh.

“You liar,” she mutters. She surges forward, her hands going to his face, the tips of her slender fingers slipping into his hair. Tommy can’t breathe. She rolls in like a wave, like the tide, her mouth arrowing towards his like she’s been building to this all along. Tommy can’t help himself. He leans to close the last gap, to taste her just once—

And she stops a half-centimetre from his lips, her hands ice-cold against his stubble.

“You fucking _liar_ ,” she says almost sadly. She’s caught somewhere between victory and longing. Tommy puts both hands out, means to anchor her in his car somehow. It’s too close, now, there’s no way she can just _stop_ this. But she twitches away, slides her hips further towards the door. Her nails dig into his hairline and she places the softest, chastest kiss against the centre of his mouth.

Before he’s even had time to understand that it’s happening she’s pushing him away and sliding from the car, the door slamming like a gunshot in the silent street.

He sits in the car until she gets to her door. She doesn’t look back even once.

Tommy doesn’t know whether to rage or to cry. He settles for passing his hand once, tiredly, over his face and twisting his keys in the engine.  Lindy Sampson would have him tied him knots even without the serial killer laughing over her shoulder. He doesn’t know if he’s sorry for it.


End file.
